Update on the Laskin Energy Center project.

The Laskin group is in the last week before the project deadline. All group members have been putting in extra time and energy (including over Thanksgiving break) to achieve our goal of creating a deliverable product that our client should find advantageous and user-friendly.

The aspects in which I have been spending the majority of my time and efforts on most recently have been: Programming the user interface, updating the spreadsheet calculations and the ability to trend data gathered from the server located on-site at MN Power. The user interface is now finished and is automatically updating and the spreadsheet efficiency calculations have also been completed.

This weekend, Matt and I worked on the VBA code, which gathers data from the server at MN Power from a specified time and interval range, then calculates the efficiencies and subsequently graphs the data automatically. During this portion of programming, I was reminded of the importance of knowing mathematical equations very well in order to apply them when writing a computer program that relies on the use of such equations. The hope is that this portion of the program will give “at a glance” information allowing for predictive rather than reactive maintenance. The data will help keep the power plant operating at optimal efficiency.

We will be headed to Laskin Energy Center on Tuesday to verify that the computer program runs as designed as we work to finalize this project.

Reviewed by: Matt Hudson

Update on the Laskin Energy Project

Since the beginning of the semester, our group has been working at Laskin Energy Center towards our goal of:

1. Determining the necessary equations to calculate a variety of efficiencies throughout the plant.
2. Identifying the types of data collected by the plant instruments.

With the deadline of December 6^th, 2010 fast approaching, the Laskin team has made great strides in the last several weeks towards a successful completion of our project. As a team, we have divided the remainder of the project into four main components:

• Project Phase 1: Efficiency calculation spreadsheet with coding documentation
• Project Phase 2: Make recommendations for additional instrumentation
• Final presentation including PowerPoint and poster
• Final technical report

Laskin Energy Center, our client, uses a data collection program called PI Tag Configuration (software made by OSIsoft) to gather information throughout the plant. The data gathered by PI will be imported into our Excel program. Using the Excel VBA programming language, the customer can view near real-time data of the plant along with generating efficiency reports for a set date range.

Last week, Eric and I have traveled to Laskin in Hoyt Lakes, MN to determine how to use the PI data collection tool. We began by identifying how to acquire the current values for instrumentation data then moved on to gathering data for a specified date range. This is where our first troubles occurred. First, we had to figure out how to retrieve a range of data; second, there were no reference materials to figure out how to write VBA code for PI. After experimenting with PI, we were able to get the desired results from a date range but no code integration. We contacted OSIsoft via phone and were able to get help importing data into Excel using VBA. This critical information allowed for the coding of PI data retrieval. All that remains now for the first phase is to design a user interface which implements the code we have written. Hopefully by the end of the week, the first phase will be complete!

Reviewed by: Eric Schaupp

GE Challenge

One IRE group has spent the semester competing in the GE challenge, a design competition where a team of engineering students are paired with a GE plant, trying to increase efficiency. This IRE project group is partnered with Midwest Electric, a GE plant in Mankato, Minnesota. Our completion of this project required quite a bit of travel and effective use of the time we spent at the plant, but we overcame these difficulties and implemented positive changes at Midwest Electric. We learned a lot about industrial engineering and lean manufacturing, but as important as that, was our exposure to professional development opportunities.

One of the major lessons we learned was how to make changes smoother by involving everyone affected. When we first proposed many of our changes, some of the floor employees were resistant. So to get the positive involvement of these employees we informed them of what we were doing, and, why we were doing it that way. Not only did this get the employee's more comfortable with our changes, they made some suggestions an outside observer would never have made. This helped our project go more smoothly for both us and for the plant.

The last part of our project is the final design presentation. We are now preparing for that presentation, to GE corporate. Wish us luck for this upcoming Friday.

IRE -Filter Wash Project Update!

We are at the one month mark till project completion. It's definitely crunch time. The Utac team has a mighty impressive experiment we designed in house, to test the confidence of our design for United Taconite. Attached to this post is the wet lab operations of our experiment. We have designed a filter bag stand to hold the filter sector with the designed bag over it, in a stationary position. We have five different nozzles that we are trying to test. They all have different spray patterns (angle) and flowrates measured in gallons per minute. We purchased a 1hp pump from L&M Supply for increased pressure from the current 50psi the janitors slop sink has to offer from MRCTC. We are going to run our test at 50, 75, and 100psi; check visually how clean it is., and compare it to the 1-10 scale we developed to rate the color differential. After all the wet lab analysis is complete, we then send it over to the dry portion of the lab where we hook up a 3" dia. filter bag section in a channel of PVC pipe with a shop vac supplying vacuum. We inserted 3/8" pipe fittings to hook up a U-tube manometer to measure the differential pressure developed to cement how effective our pressure wash test performed.

Medtronic C# Program Home Stretch!

My group is working on a project for Medtronic that requires us to make a C# program that will extract the important data from an XML file created from data off of a pacemaker, so that the user viewing it can make sense of it in a relatively quicker time than their previous way of viewing it in XML form. After all of the hours put in to watching C# tutorials, making various different fun programs, reading pages of how to do's... I am finally nearing the finishing steps of my C# program. It is supposed to import an XML File from the computer (check), filter through the data for the important data, display the data for the user (check), and export it into an Excel file (check). In order to get the proper tag names from Medtronic, we have to sign a CDA (Confidentiality Disclosure Agreement). However, the CDA has not arrived yet... Filtering through the data is not a simple task though. In order to do this I made a while loop that will read one line at a time until there is no data lines left. While it is reading, it goes through multiple if statements (that require the real tagnames) and if a tagname matches the if statement, it will export that node's inner text into an Excel cell in the user friendly, easy-to-read Excel document. So close, and yet... so far away! Where, oh where are you CDA?!? I hope you are near!

Proofed by: Brianna